Hotel Lucky Hole

Hotel Lucky Hole

Opened: 16th November 2014 Schauspielhaus Zürich, Switzerland

Running Time: 2 hrs

Elena is in Zürich for the first time in her life. She has fled from her homeland, the Ukraine, to escape poverty, and now she wants to try her luck in Switzerland. She works as a prostitute with Anna, who is a little older. Anna’s former lover and "liberator", a Swiss banker, arranges to meet with them to play an odd sex game in which he would like to be strangled. When they both realize that the game is about more than the businessman’s sexual fantasy, it is already too late... They are both accused of murder and face separation.

From the reviews

"No sleep, there is no way to shut one’s eyes to these monstrous events! No way to shut one’s eyes to the degrading living conditions, to the fatal networks and dependencies that exist in red light districts, and to the way the "civilized" society is dealing with the sex-workers, who are carted like cattle for human consumption from Hungary, the former Eastern Bloc countries and elsewhere. Around these hot topics - to put it ambiguously - rotates the piece Hotel Lucky Hole." (Aargauer Zeitung)

"Overall, one sees plenty of violence and sex onstage. It is not just a tough story, but also a radically dramatic aesthetic. However, Mundruczó never uses it for the sake of shocking or provoking, but rather to make things visible, to show pure reality - never in a documentary sense, but always very clearly, in the territory of the arts and in the theater." (SRF 1)

"This is nothing like the theater of concern – man must not constantly look and state sadly how bad the world is – instead, there is an omnipresent tone of farce, of the grotesque." (Deutschlandradio Kultur)

"Of course, Hotel Lucky Hole is critical of society, since the evening shows some attitudes in society which one cannot agree with, the obviousness of society’s sickness and psychopathology. But the real story is how the whole thing fits into a narrative that is ultimately one of great emotions." (Deutschlandradio Kultur)

"In the center of the performance are Anna and her bed, and Annamária Láng is fantastic in her dual role as perpetrator and victim, as a cog in the system, within which all rotate." (Tages-Anzeiger)